Wherever one looks in the Iberic-Latin world, corporatist or neocorporatist forms of authority and sociopolitical organization appear to have staged a resurgence. One is used to thinking about such traditional states and societies as Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Paraguay in terms of their authoritarian and corporatist structures, and Portugal has by now been a self-proclaimed corporatist state for some 40 years. We shall have more to say regarding these “persistent strains” later on; what concerns us now is the apparent reemergence of corporatist ideology and organization in a variety of rapidly modernizing systems. Brazil, for instance, has always been less corporatist than Portugal in theory and in law, but today is probably just as corporatist in actual practice. Research on Mexico has by this time largely abandoned the approach that stressed that country's quasi-democratic character or its supposed democratic aspirations in favor of an approach that takes Mexico on its own terms and analyzes its frankly authoritarian and corporatist structures. The resurgence of Peronismo in Argentina clearly carries with it echoes of the corporatist, in this case “justicialist,” solutions of the 1930's and 1940's. In Peru the military elite has vowed to carry through a “revolution from above” employing corporatist ideas and organizations to structure popular participation at the grass-roots and intermediary levels and reaching up to the Council of Ministers and the central state apparatus. And of course in Chile we have seen both Allende's abortive design to install a unicameral legislature based on corporative functional representation, as well as the plans by the generals that overthrew him to inaugurate a similarly functionally representative congress (though obviously the groups represented and their weights would be significantly different in these two designs) and to deal with price, wage, and production issues through a government regulated and controlled system of gremio-sindicato relations.

It is a truism, albeit a contentious one, that in the United States there is no tradition of sustained, systematic, and intellectually sound criticism of the press. The press is certainly one of our most important institutions but in serious attention it ranks slightly ahead of soccer and slightly behind baseball. The press is attacked and often vilified, but it is not subject to sustained critical analysis—not in public, and rarely within universities or the press itself.

Most of the recent attempts to demonstrate the poverty of liberalism and political realism have accepted the realist interpretation of violence with few reservations. For example, few political theologians, theologians of hope, and theologians of revolution have reconsidered or modified this component of the realist perspective even as they have tried to dismantle realism. It is now time to splash what Holmes called “cynical acid” on this assumed orthodoxy, especially but not only in Protestantism. The pacifist perspective on war and violence deserves a hearing which this stacked jury of realists and their critics have refused to grant. This refusal results in part from Reinhold Niebuhr's critique of pacifism, widely considered even by pacifists to be trenchant and compelling.

In the aftermath of the military revolt that overthrew the Popular Unity government of Dr. Salvador Allende in September 1973, reports began to seep out of Chile that the junta was supervising revision of the constitution in a “corporativist” sense. The structural alterations contemplated are designed, in the first instance, to ensure permanent military representation in the councils of government. However, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, head of the military junta, has made it known that the new constitution will also give a prominent place to industrial, commercial, agrobusiness, mining, and professional associations, which he terms “the authentic representatives of the people.” Such employers' and trade associations—known collectively as “gremios patronales,” to distinguish them from trade unions or “gremios de obreros” — have been in existence for many years, but a number of them experienced a sharp upsurge of political militancy in the late 1960's in reaction to what their leaders perceived as the leftward drift of the then-ruling Christian Democratic Party. Their role, under the direction of the Confederation of Production and Commerce, in arousing resistance to the Popular Unity government elected in 1970 and, ultimately, in paralyzing it before its final downfall is widely known, at least in outline.

Since the time that man first began recording his excursions into mortal combat with his fellow man, he has evidenced an acute need to justify destruction and killing. This justification has usually taken the form of condensing the reasons for the struggle to a few simple issues which again usually has served to reduce the contention to a straightforward and clear-cut duality between friend and enemy, the enemy being of course wrong, evil or obstructive, while the nonenemy was on the side of right or possessed a destiny which must be fulfilled even at the expense of an otherwise harmless and indifferent adversary. What justified violent action against another group was, therefore, a comparative evaluation in terms of value priorities or normative criteria which would lead to the conclusion that violent action ought to be taken against the other party. The criteria employed can normally be seen to be of two kinds: we might call them internal and external.

“Media, Men and Morality” is undoubtedly an overblown tide, inspired in part by the alliterative propensities of one of the best-known and most vocal of contemporary media critics—former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. The problem it suggests is too vast to be encompassed here, but it is possible to get at some of its aspects in a limited way.

Recurring and fundamental questions about policy-making in the United States focus on Congress' ability to initiate legislation. Does Congress lead? How and when? Are conditions changing to enhance or inhibit congressional initiative?

Nearly all commentators on the legislative process see the president's leadership as natural. But many have argued that he has become the dominant or even exclusive initiator of major legislation. House Republican Leader John Rhodes recently wrote that “Congress has served as little more than a glorified echo chamber for the Executive Branch of government—usually content to approve or disaprove [sic], rarely willing to initiate.” Former Senator Mike Monroney asked, “Is Congress still capable of initiating and enacting its own legislative program?”

In recent years there has been a renewed interest among social scientists in authoritarianism, both as a type of regime and as a specific political approach to the problems of economic development and modernization. This revival of interest has been spurred in part by the proliferation of authoritarian regimes in the less developed countries and by the fact that many of these regimes are doing a more than creditable job in stimulating and managing the process of development and modernization.

The task of sketching the history of liberalism, though modest, is for methodological reasons difficult. For we stand before the question of whether there is even such a thing as liberalism as a clearly definable subject and whether this subject, should it not be clearly definable, can have a history. We touch here upon a general methodological problem. Toynbee, for example, opens his great work with the question whether England has a history; he concludes that the English nation as a society is so closely related to the society of Western civilization that one cannot write an English history without going into the entire history of Western civilization. It is in this sense that there arise the questions of how liberalism is to be delimited and whether it has a history. And they arise more acutely because the case of liberalism is much more complicated than that of England. For even if some phases of English history, for example the Reformation, can be dealt with only in relation to the general European history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, still there are long periods of isolated, specifically English history. In the case of liberalism, a narrowing of the subject to national societies — German, French, English or American — is hardly justifiable. For all the regional phases of liberalism are only parts of a common Western movement; and furthermore, this movement can only with difficulty be isolated from other movements which run parallel with it in time.

Every state has a constitution—a body of principles, institutions, laws, and customs that forms the framework of government—but not every state is a constitutional state. The latter is distinguished by a commitment to constitutionalism, which in essence is the idea that political life ought to be carried on according to procedures and rules that paradoxically are in some degree placed beyond politics: procedures in other words that are fundamental. Nothing so positive as a written constitution, but rather the belief that the law as the embodiment of a society's most important values is powerful, characterizes government under the rule of law.

When the Watergate dam broke, the ensuing flood of revelations about White House activities swept away a fundamental and cherished tenet of the contemporary liberal credo: the faith in the beneficence of the American presidency. Already suspect after John Kennedy's Bay of Pigs fiasco and Lyndon Johnson's Indochina policy, the dogma that “the cure for democracy is leadership,” strong, forceful presidential leadership, sank beneath the waves of Watergate. The lesson seems clear that it is naive to assume that an innate goodness characterizes the presidency. Rather it seems safer to accept the proposition that executive power, unchecked or only loosely restrained, can be used for whatever purposes a particular president seeks to promote.

Within Congress there are a number of forces that push toward decentralization of influence over the substantive legislative product and lack of coordination of the various legislative enterprises that are being conducted simultaneously. Chief among these forces most of the time are the standing committees of the two houses. There are also a few centralizing forces. Chief among these most of the time are the formal party leaders in the House and Senate, especially those of the president's party if the president views himself as a major figure in the legislative process and behaves aggressively in attempting to implement that self-image.

As the years pass, the Northern Ireland Troubles appear to have become institutionalized at an intolerable but apparently irreducible level of violence. There appears no light at the end of the tunnel, and no firm evidence that the center can hold. The bridges between a divided society have long been reduced to rubble. The Provisional IRA appears capable, even eager, to continue a campaign of guerrilla attrition damned as self-defeating, immoral, and bloody-minded by all concerned including the Official IRA. In return Protestant gunmen have opened the season on Catholics, all guilty of treason in some form, all enemies of British Ulster. And the British Army remains a tempting target even at times to the Protestant militants.

Watergate has prompted a good many voices to proclaim the urgent need for a return to constitutional government. I would like to take advantage of the current public interest in a higher morality in politics to make the case for moving up to an even higher level of politics, to a pattern of politics that I have dubbed “Prophetic Politics.” In making my case I should like to explore, compare, and criticize four patterns of politics that inevitably get pulled into the dialogue. These four are “Prophetic Politics,” “Machiavellian Politics” (illustrated so notoriously by Watergate), “Utopian Politics” (whose principles and practices must be distinguished from “Prophetic Politics,” if “Prophetic Politics” is to get a fair hearing by political realists), and “Constitutional Politics” (whose strength is being sorely tested by the Watergate revelations). I will try in this article to indicate why, indeed, I believe we must move up to a new level in politics; why we have to be on guard against and reject “Machiavellian Politics,” why it is important to distinguish between “Prophetic” and “Utopian Politics,” and why a return to “Constitutional Politics” is good but not good enough. I shall argue that there is a striking similarity between our answer to the “why” question—“Why must we move up to a new level of politics?”— and the central characteristics of “Prophetic Politics.” I shall identify the strengths and weaknesses of “Machiavellian,” “Constitutional,” and “Utopian Politics” and indicate how the practitioners of “Prophetic Politics,” while true to its central principles, can incorporate the strengths while avoiding the weaknesses of the other three patterns. I hope this analysis will place our current alarm and concern about Watergate in a larger theoretical perspective, and enable us to derive some larger value from the outpouring revelations of the media.

Until recently, Manoilesco's confident prediction could easily be dismissed as yet another example of the ideological bias, wishful thinking and overinflated rhetoric of the thirties, an événementielle response to a peculiar environment and period. With the subsequent defeat of fascism and National Socialism, the spectre of corporatism no longer seemed to haunt the European scene so fatalistically. For a while, the concept itself was virtually retired from the active lexicon of politics, although it was left on behavioral exhibit, so to speak, in such museums of atavistic political practice as Portugal and Spain.

The theme of the second Nixon administration appears to be “Save the Presidency.” It is clear that Mr. Nixon views his best defense against critics to be the claim of a constitutional imperative to defend his office. And, he continually reminds us, it is an obligation to defend not only the Presidency, but the strong Presidency.

Mr. Nixon's attachment to the strong Presidency is more than a protective strategy. It grows out of American practice and recent theory. His language and themes are predictable within our political system. In American national politics, substantive issues and questions of institutional roles are continually entangled.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a few republics began to enjoy more prolonged moments of political stability, Latin American leaders developed a mania for economic progress. Under the influence of a heterodox form of positivism and in many instances inclined to emulate United States social and economic models, progress-oriented Latin Americans looked upon classical liberalism and the bourgeois, individualistic, profit ethic as the keys to success. Traditional paternalistic devices were repudiated in the interest of converting all members of society who were capable of the transformation — considerable doubt prevailed as to whether Indians, Blacks and various mixed bloods were capable — into competitive, individualistic capitalists whose success in attaining self-reliance and economic independence would propel their nations onward.

The postwar era in international politics has been one of success and failure in the search for conflict adjustment among major powers. It is sobering to examine the list of issues inscribed at one time or another on the agenda of the United Nations and count the number for which resolution has never been achieved. For example, little, if any progress has been made toward a political settlement in the Middle East, South Africa's policies, Eastern Europe, the denuclearization of Latin America or countless other issues outstanding around the world. It would be interesting to compare the pattern of conflict adjustment in international assemblies with that in national legislative bodies to throw light on the differences between the processes and prospects at the two levels.

Ever since Leo Strauss and C. B. Macpherson, at almost the same moment, challenged the received view of Locke with their novel interpretations of his political philosophy, the question of how Locke wrote, and therefore of how he is to be read, has been prominent in most discussions of Locke. Strauss brought the issue to the fore by arguing the thesis that Locke engaged in “esoteric writing,” that is, that he intentionally said things he did not believe and sometimes withheld things he did, for the purpose of securing both his own safety and the greater likelihood of success of his philosophic project. Needless to say for so bold a claim, the Strauss thesis has not gone unopposed. Sharp issue has been taken both with the claim about Locke's esotericism and more substantively with the philosophic position Strauss attributes to Locke. It is clear that the two issues are intimately connected: the kind of “Locke” one finds depends to a very great extent on the kind of hermeneutical principles one adopts in approaching his work.